total more than thirty expeditions to offer relief or rescue and, in time, to find out what had gone wrong, and recover whatever expedition records that may have survived. What searchers found instead were scraps and discards from abandoned campsites, graves, and finally, a long trail of discarded equipment and bones where men had lain down and died. Apart from a few books and scraps of paper, the only written record was a standard Admiralty form, twice annotated, that Lt. William Hobson pulled from a rock cairn on the desolate shores of King William Island. It recorded the survey of a party in 1847, and the 25 April 1848 abandonment of Erebus and Terror, news of the deaths of Franklin and other men, and of a march about to start southward. The late Garth Walpole (1961–2015), archaeologist and Franklin scholar from Hobart, Tasmania, wrote his undergraduate thesis on the Franklin relics held at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. This initial effort led to a lifetime of work that culminated in this book, which he had largely completed before his death. His wife, Alison, turned the manuscript over to Russell Potter, another Franklin and Arctic exploration scholar. A professor of English and Media Studies at Rhode Island College, Russell was completing his edits on Garth’s manuscript when Alison suffered a relapse of cancer and also died. To read this and think that editing and publishing Relics of the Franklin Expedition is a noble and right thing to do for a colleague and friend is only partly correct. What Russell Potter has done in bringing the book forward for Garth and Alison is to also provide the world with something rare—another book on Franklin, but one that actually makes a contribution and adds new dimensions. As an editor, Russell did an exceptional job with his informed, respectful hand not overwashing Garth’s work. Drawing on his education as an archaeologist, Walpole assessed every artifact recovered by 19th- and 20th-century searchers from Franklin sites as material culture, but also as artifacts that in most cases had a story to tell. The stories speak to the people who made, used, cherished, lost, died with the artifacts, and later found them. This rich context provides not only a comprehensive contextualized catalogue, it offers testimony about the men, the expedition,
the uses and failures of technology, of desperation, and of an obsessive quest to sort this evidence, starting in 1850, to learn what had happened, and how. The book is divided into two introductions—Russell’s and Garth’s—and five chapters that provide a “material biography,” the historical context and timeline for the discovery and recovery of the items, a detailed examination of their various contexts, and their value, both scientifically and intrinsically, as relics. The work is something I recommend to any archaeologist studying material culture, and especially how artifacts move through space and time. The discussion on the transmutation of artifacts from government and personal property to discarded things, or precious items kept close or on one’s body at the time of death, to material recovered by the Inuit in their resource-deprived environment, to the various spiritual associations placed upon them by Victorian thinkers, is powerful. Whether you are fascinated with naval and maritime history, the Arctic and the saga of the Northwest Passage, Franklin, material culture, or archaeology, this is the book for you. Thoughtfully and comprehensively illustrated in all the right places with contemporary drawings, maps and photographs, appendices that catalogue the various holdings, extensive notes, a bibliography, and an index, this book will also satisfy the serious scholar and academic. Not believing book reviews should air minor quibbles, my only note is that I know of a few relics in obscure holdings that could be added to the mix, but they would be but additional polish on an already gleaming apple. James P. Delgado Jacksonville, Florida The Outer Beach: A Thousand-Mile Walk on Cape Cod’s Atlantic Shore by Robert Finch (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2017, map, isbn 978-0-393-08130-5; $26.95hc) Who doesn’t love a good jaunt on the beach? Now envision a half century of exploring a remarkable stretch of natural coastline with your fun, mischievous, inquisitive, poetic friend, and you get a sense of reading The Outer Beach by Robert Finch.
This collection of essays spans the author’s fifty-odd years exploring and writing about Cape Cod’s forty-mile-long Outer Beach, during which he estimates he’s walked about one thousand miles. Fourteen chapters cover different sections of the coast, and each contains chronologically arranged essays. The book is not intended to be a complete scientific or cultural study, nor is it a running narrative; it is a collection of decades of essays, observations, and reflections on the wildlife, history, and geology of this dramatic, famous, and significant coastline. In one essay Finch explains why he doesn’t meditate at the beach—so that he can soak it all in and “pay it the attention it deserves.” This is evident in the curiosity and sophistication of his observations of the wildlife. For example: “I have begun to notice that birdsong, like the flowering schedule of plants, seems to be affected by the exposed environment here. The song sparrows, for instance, all have thin, scratchy, attenuated voices here, as though all the sap had been dried out of their notes by the salt air.” This dynamic physical landscape deserves brilliant writing, and Finch does not disappoint. On seeing cliffs erode in real time: “It was like watching something frozen and rusted come alive, with stiff but powerful movements of its limbs and torso, destroying itself in the effort. The beach and the cliff were once more on the move, in a symphony of form and motion.” And on watching a fog bank: “The fog, it seems, has not left for good, but has retreated north and lies, just offshore there, like some low, snarling, purplish-brown, snakelike presence—treading air, indecisive, advancing hesitantly and retreating again like some cowardly dragon, kept at bay by the offshore wind.” More than mere stories of beach walks, birds, and storms, The Outer Beach explores the human need for primal encounters at the coast, their impact on our lives, and what they reveal about our inner selves. For example, on his unacted-upon instinct to scavenge from an ancient shipwreck temporarily exposed on the beach: “And why not? If the wreck is going to be reclaimed by the sea anyway, why not let us grab some piece of it before it goes, something that will give us some tactile connection, if only in our imaginations, with a more
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